Friday, June 5, 2009

science - better, arts - not so good

Came across this blog article today (it's in marathi). I wondered most of the things I never thought about before. I hardly have any friends from my school or junior college who had excellent marks in 10th and still went to arts stream for the 12th. I have some examples where people gave 12th exam in science and later shifted to arts stream.
I felt ashamed that till few years back myself used to look down at arts graduates thinking that either they chose arts stream because they didn't have good marks in 10th/12th or they lack the 'intelligence' required for science/commerce streams. Though my views became clean and clear in last 2-3 years, I still wonder about the surroundings that were responsible for conditioning of my mind.
Like the author says in the blog article, don't we need good socialogists, economists, political analysts, journalists, linguists along with 'doctors' and 'engineers'? Then since when and why did this 'science - better, arts - not so good' came into existence?
One reason that I find is education is always related to employment or salary. There have been different opinions about what edducation is for - right from Mahatma Gandhi to Ravindranath Tagore and from J Krishnamoorthy to A. S. Neil. A common person hardly looks at education as a process of becoming a good learner for his/her lifetime. Since high paying jobs were grabbed by science stream people (atleast till few years back), it would have helped in creating the 'science better - arts not so good' picture.
A side note while concluding this - few days back, I came across an excellent work on education process by Acharya Vinoba Bhave - "Shikshan Vichar". The book comments precisely on the purpose of education process, the means of it, its implications, its practicality. The essays in the book are more than relevant to current times (or rather it is relevant to the education process irrespective of times).

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